You So Tracy!

Don’t try and act like you were with Tracy Morgan from the getgo. Sure, the dude had some funny Saturday Night Live skits, like Brian Fellow ("not an accredited zoologist… He is simply an enthusiastic young man with a sixthgrade education and an abiding love for all God’s creatures"), but Morgan wasn’t exactly Will Ferrell. You may have laughed at his wacko commercials for ESPN video games a few years back—especially that one where a crosseyed Morgan confronted Ben Wallace in a dark stairwell and told him "the way I dunk on you is gonna look unorthodod"—but you surely didn’t watch The Tracy Morgan Show, the NBC sitcom in which he played a beleaguered dad. Don’t worry The rest of the planet didn’t watch that, either.

Then this year happened. It felt like an urgent memo from the intergalactic comedy office; all of a sudden, everyone was talking about how funny Tracy Morgan is. It began with Morgan’s turn on 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s dry sitcom &#xE0; clef about SNL, in which Morgan plays a paranoid comedian named Tracy…Jordan, who says things like "I love this corn bread so much I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant" and rolls with an entourage that includes a guy named Dot Com. It may not be the biggest stretch in acting history, but Morgan does it brilliantly deadpan, like in this scene with Alec Baldwin, who plays network boss Jack Donaghy

Jack Tracy…I wanted to invite you to join me at a charity golf tourney that Don Geiss is hosting at his country club in Old Saybrook.

Tracy[walking to bar] I’m not familiar with about half the words in that sentence.

Morgan accrued enough moments like this on 30 Rock that pretty soon you started hearing Tracy Morganisms around the office ("I love this copy machine so much I want to get it pregnant") in a way you never did during all his years on SNL. NBC pushed Morgan for an Emmy nomination, and movie offers, previously in short supply, started rolling his way. "I suspect film may be a better format for Tracy than SNL," emails Fey, who cites other examples "Look at Ben Stiller and Sarah Silverman and Julia LouisDreyfus. Anyone who’s met Tracy will tell you he’s exactly like Julia LouisDreyfus."

Badumbump! Of course, what’s also driving Tracy Mania is the public’s suspicion that the 38yearold comic may actually be as batty as his 30 Rock character. YouTube is a feast of loopy Tracy Morgan moments (click here for our four best), from 30 Rock to his rambling talkshow appearances on Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel Live to his unhinged interview on a morning chat program in El Paso, in which Morgan tells the audience that he’s fresh from a local strip club, Jaguars, and that "someone is going to get pregnant while I’m in town." Then, unprompted, he strips off his shirt before the flabbergasted local anchorman. "I don’t have what LL got," Morgan says, slapping his flabby abdomen. "I don’t got biscuits. I got a loaf of bread. Come get this, ladies…. All the pretty ladies, that’s a mating call."

Maybe you loved it, maybe you didn’t, but you can’t argue the result. We may not have appreciated him a few years back, but crazy is working very well right now for Tracy Morgan.

You know the one thing people don’t know about me That I’m a big sci freak. I know all about the relationship between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker."

It’s 1245 p.m. at Tracy Morgan’s house.

"It was an awesome relationship, man. You know Han never called him Luke He always called him Kid. There was a lot of love there, man. You see that out on the ice planet in The Empire Strikes Back, when Han went out to get Luke. There’s love."

Fortyfive minutes ago, Morgan met me at the front door of his West Hollywood penthouse apartment wearing nothing but his bor shorts. Inside, the place looked like it had been attacked by a bunch of high school students. Throughout the living room and kitchen were rows of old plastic soda bottles and stacks of DVDs and CDs, and on the balcony lay the greasy remains of a barbecue. Morgan, who was in town shooting a movie with Ice Cube, said he hadn’t stayed at the apartment "in eons" (30 Rock is filmed in New York). Mostly, the place seemed to be a sneaker museum; on the floor was an avalanche of kicks, from suedes to shelltoes. When I asked Morgan how many pairs he owned, he said, "About 4,000."

Morgan was in a polite but slightly cranky mood. A newspaper gossip item had surfaced claiming he’d recently boozed the night away at a Las Vegas nightclub, chugging vodka straight from the bottle. A few months ago, such an item would have been dogbitesman, but now it’s sensitive, given Morgan’s legal situation After a pair of DUI arrests, Morgan was ordered by a judge to wear an ankle bracelet called a SCRAM (secure continuous remote alcohol monitor), which checks his bloodalcohol content through his pores.

"If I have less than a drop of alcohol, it sends a signal back to Denver, and then the cops come and take me to jail," Morgan says. He sticks out his foot and shows me the bulky black apparatus on his right ankle. "This isn’t home detection. This is alcohol detection. I have to wear it for ninety days."

Morgan claims the Vegas story isn’t true, that he went to the club, yes, but he didn’t drink alcohol. He says he’s been sober for two months, working with a couple of M.D.’s in New York who have monitored his progress. "I don’t have a good relationship with alcohol," he says. "So I let it go. It’s not something I think about every day. When I’m walking around—" Morgan gets up from a chair and takes a few steps. "Look, I walk well, right I’m not walking like this leg is broke."

This much is true Tracy Morgan did love himself a good time. He freely admits to partying it up during his sevenyear stint on Saturday Night Live. "I’d be going home at twelve o’clock in the afternoon. You wanna know about the afterafterafterparty Oh, those were hot, baby." Jimmy Kimmel, who cast Morgan in his Comedy Central series Crank Yankers as a character named Spoonie Luv, tells a story about a time when he and Morgan and some friends went for steaks at Mastro’s restaurant in L.A. and the dinner ended with Morgan removing his shirt (a recurring gag, it seems) and loudly imitating a lockerroom speech by an old high school football coach. "Everyone [else] had to take a knee in the middle of the restaurant," Kimmel recalls. "And he’s yelling at fifteen grown men." Still, a moment later, Kimmel says "I think it’d be great if Tracy didn’t drink as much. I’d be dishonest if I said I didn’t worry about him."

Morgan says his rock bottom occurred shortly after his second DUI bust, in November 2006. He’d been invited to the traditional lighting of the enormous Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, right below the NBC studio where he’d once starred on SNL, but he says that after the arrest he was asked not to show up. "I cried all day," Morgan admits. "Coming from the projects of Brooklyn to lighting the tree. We watched it on TV, and it hurt me. I felt like I had let down all the cast members from 30 Rock. I said, ’No more. I’m done.’ "

Morgan worries that the DUI arrests and reported antics have overshadowed the most successful year of his career. His party image has proven difficult to outrun. Few believe it when he says he was stonecold sober (unverifiable) and just doing parts of his standup act (true) during that El Paso TV appearance (which, by the way, took place more than a year and a half ago, before he even began working on 30 Rock).

"It’s been up and down, and ugly," he says. "Sometimes it’s painful. But you take the good, you take the bad." Morgan suddenly breaks into a knowing smile. "You take them both, and there you have The Facts of Life. The Facts of Life!"

He goes on, "I’m not the only person in this world who’s ever gotten a DUI or wore a fucking bracelet or drank. Outside of show business, I live a very normal life. I’m not in a mansion. I’m kickin’ it." He nods to the grimy furniture on the balcony. "Me and you, sitting here at my dirty table."

That Tracy Morgan made it anywhere was not a small accomplishment. He was raised in the Marlboro projects near Coney Island, where his older brother was born with cerebral palsy and his father, James, wandered in and out of his life after returning from Vietnam and becoming addicted to heroin. James Morgan died of AIDS in 1987. "He was righteous, but he just always had that addiction," Morgan says. "He was Richard Pryor funny. I can remember being on the basketball courts in the projects, and he would always have a crowd around him."

A talented high school athlete—he played football and ran track—Morgan took the fast lane to adulthood. He married his high school sweetheart, Sabina, and the couple have three boys, ages 21, 20, and 16. Tracy and Sabina are now in the process of separating. But the age of Morgan’s children raises a familiar question Tracy, aren’t you 38

"When you grow up in the ghetto, man, you use sex as a sedative," he says, laughing. "It eases the pain of poverty. ’You’re broke, I’m broke—let’s make a baby!’ "

That line is part of Morgan’s standup act (later on I realize the Luke Skywalker bit is, too), but it’s also real. So was the unlikely march Morgan made to get to Saturday Night Live, going from an apprenticeship with the Uptown Comedy Club in Harlem and Def Comedy Jam gigs to an occasional guest part on the Martin Lawrence sitcom, Martin, to an audition at SNL’s famed Studio 8H in 1996. "I was coming from a world of black," Morgan recalls. "So off the bat, I felt an inferiority complex, because I knew it was an allwhite thing. This was pop culture I was getting into. I was worried about these people getting my material."

Morgan got the job but admits that his debut was "terrifying." "The first show I was on was with Tom Hanks, and it blew my mind." It would take Morgan some time to find his zone at SNL. "I thought he was fresh, and that’s the thing I’m always looking for," recalls SNL creator Lorne Michaels. "In terms of the camera and TV technique, he was going to have to learn all that. But as you can see, by the time he leaves [in 2003] and we’re on to Brian Fellow, he’s nailed it all."

If you haven’t gone back and reviewed the Tracy Morgan SNL oeuvre, it deserves a second look. The characters he developed on the show were almost pathologically weird—a lipglosswearing amateur zoologist; a sewerdwelling homeless romantic named Woodrow who seduced guests like Kate Hudson; a velvety, Sammy Davis Jr.channeling spaceman (Astronaut Jones) with a randy appetite for aliens. In one Astronaut Jones skit, Morgan visually undresses an alien played by host Britney Spears before barking, "Why don’t you drop out of that green jumpsuit and show me that fat ass!" Spears blushes visibly and then cracks up; Morgan keeps a straight face.

"No matter how mean you play Tracy, you sense the sweetness," says Lorne Michaels. "It always comes through, which is why he can get away with the things he gets away with."

Morgan loved his time on Saturday Night Live, referring repeatedly in interviews to the show as the Dagobah System (a reference to where Yoda lives in the Star Wars movies) and to Michaels as ObiWan Kenobi. But his maiden voyage outside the Dagobah System was a flop—a sixteenepisode run as a carmechanic dad on The Tracy Morgan Show. "They wanted to reinvent him as Cosby," says Michaels, who was tangentially involved in the production and is now an ecutive producer of 30 Rock. "And I think going through that was very hard on him. Because it’s one thing to fail. It’s another to fail when you’re not being yourself."

That’s one of the reasons Morgan is thrilled by 30 Rock. The overthetop, offbalance Tracy Jordan, who goes through his days uttering the most inappropriate and deeply bizarre things, is a far better fit. Morgan was the first actor Tina Fey cast for the show. "I like how raw Tracy is as a performer," she says. "And the weird stuff that comes out of his mouth is gold."

"On 30 Rock, I’m just home," Morgan says. "Tina knows my voice, which is one of the hardest things to do in show business—to get someone who knows your voice." Consider this moment, in which Tracy and his crew try to decide how to spend a cash windfall

Dot Com We could add someone else to the entourage.

Tracy That’s a good idea. Yo, what’s Young Larry doing these days

Grizz He’s in JayZ’s entourage.

Tracy What about Cheese

Dot Com He’s rolling with Ghostface Killah now.

Tracy Fat Balls

Dot Com Studying hotel administration at Cornell.

Tracy Well, go ahead, Fat Balls! That’s a good program!

How close is Tracy Jordan to the real Tracy Lorne Michaels says it’s "as close as Dean Martin’s character was to Dean Martin." There’s been speculation that Morgan’s spoofing his old mentor, Martin Lawrence. But Morgan says he’s not doing Lawrence and claims Jordan is based on "my cousin Craig, who was nuts back in the day. He’d run down the street three times without underwear on."

But sure, there’s some real Tracy in there, too. "We borrow a lot from Tracy’s ampedup public personality," allows Fey. "The clearest distinction is that Tracy Jordan is mentally ill and Tracy Morgan is not."

It’s clear that Morgan is a little tired of clarifying the differences between who he is oncamera and who he is in real life. No one asked Diana Ross if she was a heroin addict when she played Billie Holiday, he points out. And he’s concerned that the speculation will interfere with his career goals. And what are they For starters he wants to direct, and to produce.

"And my longterm goal is to one day do a twohour concert film on Broadway," he says. "All of those things are in the works right now. I got a hot cock, man. A hot cock and low cash."

Morgan’s 16yearold son, Tracy Jr., appears on the balcony. He’s on summer vacation from high school and visiting L.A. with his dad. I ask him what the past year’s been like to be Tracy Morgan’s son.

"When he got the bracelet, I was definitely worried," Tracy Jr. says. "And it’s crazy when people come up to me and say, ’Hey, I see your dad on TV, and are the rumors true’ And there are rumors I’ve never heard of. I know my dad better than anybody, probably, and he’s not a bad person. But when he does outrageous things, people aren’t ready for it."

"It’s like fine wine," Tracy senior says. "You got to let it age, and then people look back and say it was funny."

So let the Tracy Morgan appreciation begin now. Hopefully, he’ll take care of the personal life, keep his name out of the papers for doing things he’s not supposed to do. Morgan can enjoy his new sobriety and his kids and his growing reputation as comedy’s hottest late bloomer. He’ll become a hot cock with big cash—and maybe he’ll even keep his shirt on. If this can happen, life will be very good for Tracy Morgan. It’s going to be so good, someone’s going to get pregnant.

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